The type system at the base of our platform, GType, has various kinds of derivability:
- simple derivability, where you’re allowed to create your derived version of an existing type, but you cannot derive your type any further;
- deep derivability, where you’re allowed to derive types from other types;
An example of the first kind is any type inheriting from GBoxed, whereas an example of the second kind is anything that inherits from GTypeInstance, like GObject.
Additionally, any derivable type can be marked as abstract; an abstract type cannot be instantiated, but you can create your own derived type which may or may not be “concrete”. Looking at the GType reference documentation, you’ll notice various macros and flags that exist to implement this functionality—including macros that were introduced to cut down the boilerplate necessary to declare and define new types.
The G_DECLARE_* family of macros, though, introduced a new concept in the type system: a “final” type. Final types are leaf nodes in the type hierarchy: they can be instantiated, but they cannot be derived any further. GTK 4 makes use of this kind of types to nudge developers towards composition, instead of inheritance. The main problem is that the concept of a “final” type is entirely orthogonal to the type system; there’s no way to programmatically know that a type is “final”—unless you have access to the introspection data and start playing with heuristics about symbol visibility. This means that language bindings are unable to know without human intervention if a type can actually be inherited from or not.
In GLib 2.70 we finally plugged the hole in the type system, and we introduced the G_TYPE_FLAG_FINAL flag. Types defined as “final” cannot be derived any further: as soon as you attempt to register your new type that inherits from a “final” type, you’ll get a warning at run time. There are macros available that will let you define final types, as well.
Thanks to the “final” flag, we can also include this information into the introspection data; this will allow language bindings to warn you if you attempt at inheriting from a “final” type, likely using language-native tools, instead of getting a run time warning.
If you are using G_DECLARE_FINAL_TYPE in your code you should bump up your GObject dependency to 2.70, and switch your implementation from G_DEFINE_TYPE and friends to G_DEFINE_FINAL_TYPE.